Canadian company gives big to Romney

A U.S. subsidiary of a big Canadian insurance company, Fairfax Holdings, has donated $1 million to Restore Our Future, the big-spending “SuperPAC” formed by former Mitt Romney associates to promote his presidential candidacy.

The donation by OdysseyRE was voted by a subcommittee of the company’s board of directors, all Americans.

The insurance company’s big bucks fall in a murky zone under the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United ruling. The Supremes overturned precedents dating back 103 years to President Theodore Roosevelt and cleared the way for corporations to give unlimited amounts of money to SuperPACS.

But the high court barred such donations by foreign firms. It left undefined the issue of U.S. subsidiaries.

“We had no role: The U.S. company is in fact our largest (subsidiary) and they had business reasons for doing it, but we played no role at all,” Paul Rivett, a vice president at Fairfax Holdings, told the Globe and Mail in Toronto, where Fairfax is based.

Peter Lovell, counsel general at OdysseyRE, added: “Governor Romney has proposed meaningful corporate tax reform that would help level the playing field; consequently, a victory by Governor Romney in November would be beneficial to OdysseyRE.”

Major corporate donations in political campaigns are nowadays business decisions.